Literary Devices in The Secret Miracle
Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
Setting
The When, the Where, and the HowThere's no question about when and where "The Secret Miracle" takes place. In fact, the very first line situates the story in a very specific historical context. It'...
Narrator Point of View
Most of this story is told from a narrative perspective with which we're pretty familiar: the narrator is an uninvolved third party who has a psychic knowledge of everything that Jaromir Hladik is...
Genre
Man, you really put us in a tough spot here, Shmoopers. Borges' stories are always difficult to classify in terms of genre, because they incorporate the characteristics of so many different kinds o...
Tone
The narrator of "The Secret Miracle" adopts a mostly-objective tone, relating the events of Jaromir's imprisonment and execution the way a news station might tell a human-interest story on televisi...
Writing Style
Chock Full o' Information; Visual; ReferentialNB: Before we begin, let's not forget that "The Secret Miracle" was originally written in Spanish. But we think our translator did a pretty good job, s...
What's Up With the Title?
"The Secret Miracle." Sounds like the name of a Nicholas Sparks book, right? Well, if you're looking for tear-jerking beach reading, you've come to the wrong place.Let's take a look at why Borges m...
What's Up With the Epigraph?
And God caused him to die for a hundred years, and then raised him to life. And God said, "How long hast thou waited?" He said, "I have waited a day or part of a day."Qur'ān, 2:261No one's confuse...
What's Up With the Ending?
Well, you can't beat this ending for brevity: "Jaromir Hladik died on the twenty-ninth of March, at 9:02 A.M." (13). For a story in which we find such complicated and lengthy sentences, this is a h...
Tough-o-Meter
First, let's be clear: we're talking about the translated version of this story. If you want to read it in the original Spanish, you might want to bump this up a few notches on the tough-o-meter (u...
Plot Analysis
Wrong Place at the Wrong TimeJaromir Hladik is a Jewish intellectual living in Prague at the start of World War II. This is kind of a dangerous time for Jews living in Czechoslovakia – and that's...
Trivia
Get this: director Christopher Nolan says that the movie Inception was inspired in part by "The Secret Miracle." Now that is a fun fact. (Source.)Borges thought that writing long books was a waste...
Steaminess Rating
Borges' short stories are generally the literary equivalent of a cold shower. The next time you're feeling hot and bothered and need to calm down, just pick up "The Secret Miracle" and you'll be go...
Allusions
Sefer Yetsirah (2)Parmenides, "static Being" (4)Hinton, "modifiable past" (4)Francis Bradley (4)Maimonides (8)Virgil, Fourth Eclogue (12)Jakob Boehme (1)The Third Reich (1)Gestapo (2)The Anschluss...